Sol Logos
The Living Force
When a being loses knowledge, does that mean that this knowledge is lost on the level of universal consciousness as well?
One possible reason I see why learning never stops: If existence is a true infinity, then there is always something new in that infinity to experience and explore, never ending.
These ideas get a little muddled because how do we accumulate learning if it needs time when there's no time?
Or, similarly, how is something lost if that needs somewhere to go when there's no space for it to be lost?
I was thinking about what Joe said earlier: when we hit a paradox, it's a good sign we're thinking about it wrong, it's the wrong question, or something like that.
Maybe it's like a set of DVDs that we don't have a player for anymore. I mean, those DVD players are probably kind of rare nowadays.
So, knowledge is stored somewhere like those DVDs, and it's not lost, per se. We just need to go buy an old working player from eBay :) I guess that means the potential remains to access what we could practically say is lost (for now) but isn't, in theory, lost at all.
So, could learning be like that, too? It's there, always, and yeah, like you said, it could be infinite, but to learn, we need time. So, we've got to gear our consciousness towards that temporal and spatial realm to do it and experience all the trade-offs that go along with that.
I've been thinking those four worlds from Kabbalah have something to say about this. The first world is emanation—it's the start of creation, the first split, and thus, duality. It's got fire as its elemental force, I suppose because it's like the first spark. It maybe needs to be aware of itself, so it creates a reflection. That self-reflection, the start of thought, is the second world—it has the air element, perhaps because air could mean space between the reflection and the one being reflected. That then generates all kinds of other reflections, the third world, like the mirror is all smashed into a multitude of pieces, separated but connected; it has water as its element. You could say the ocean is like that—it's full of little droplets of water forming a single body. Then all those pieces need to be interacting with one another if there's going to be any learning happening! So that's the fourth world, the place of action, time and space, and all that. It obviously has earth as its element.
So, those four worlds are stabilized by their interdependence. But like the elemental forces, there's a fifth element, aether. In the four worlds idea, there's a world without a number, Adam Kadmon (I'm not particularly fond of the name), but the idea is like the mediator between those four worlds. So, in the analogy above, that's where maybe all the DVDs and VHSs are stored. So there's a mediator between the material and immaterial, always, somehow with a very extensive library!
It's represented by that Tree of Life thing. But for me, the interdependence of it would be better represented by a tetrahedron. It's got four points, all connected to every other point. And if you trace each inwardly, there's a fifth point at the center.
I mean, it's a nice story, and it kind of makes sense as a basic idea that seems to come up in various forms outside of Kabbalah, those elemental forces, for example. But in the end, it's just a model for understanding how it could all fit together. But as they say, the map is never the terrain. And who even knows what the right map is anyway?